Transcript

Peter Bohmer: [Music begins playing in the background.] One thing I think that happens in society is we have a very limited historical memory. In the United States there's been a lot of oppression, but there's always been resistance. To me I think of education a lot, not just as formal, but informal. This idea of trying to do education, not in a top down way, but more where you respect the people and you try to build on their experience and have them understand it more deeply. I think that’s so important that people have some knowledge of what people have done, so we can learn from mistakes, but also strengthen them. Nothing is ever exactly the same, but I think historical memory is really important.

Kelsey Smith: Welcome to Community Roots, a community oral history project about how people come together to make change and create new possibilities for themselves and their neighbors. I’m Kelsey Smith, and we’ll be learning about the Liberation Cafe in Olympia, Washington.

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I first became aware of the Liberation Cafe through my friend Pat Tassoni while working on a project related to Olympia’s indie music scene. Pat made good use of his time during the COVID-19 pandemic and scanned all of the flyers, newsletters, and ephemera related to the Liberation Cafe. He emailed me a link to a gigantic file, which simmered on a back burner while I continued my music work. Still, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Pat’s document. When my music project partner Elaine Vradenburgh presented me with an opportunity to interview activists for the Community Roots oral history cohort, I returned to the concept of the Liberation Cafe. I am honored to have interviewed several of the people who made this ambitious and loose collective a reality.

Today, we’ll be talking to Peter Bohmer, a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College and one of the members of the Liberation Cafe. Peter founded the Economics for Everyone organization and continues to work on many activist causes in Olympia. Here’s Peter.

Peter: I was born in New York City during World War Two - the end of World War Two. My parents were immigrants, Jewish immigrants from Austria, who suffered a lot. Growing up in New York in a very close family, the ideas of the dignity of all people, everybody is the same, really affected us. We often discussed what was going on in the news every day. On the other hand, [my parents] felt very powerless to change things.

And then going to college in the '60s. I went to MIT – I was really into math in high school – on a scholarship and the movements of the ‘60s really affected me. I became active, first in the Civil Rights [Movement] and then Black Liberation Movement support and the anti-war movement. That's always been very much a part of my life; thinking that the economic system we live in can be improved, reformed, but we need a fundamentally different system that does not oppress people around the world. So this commitment to creating a different world and doing what we can on a day-to-day level has very much motivated me from 1967 until today. Fifty-five years.

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I lived in San Diego in the early, mid-’70s. I was a teacher [an assistant professor of economics] at San Diego State [University]. I then spent a little bit of time in prison for an anti-war [protest], and some faculty members at San Diego State started this place called the Center for Radical Economics [CRE]. When I got out in 1973, I became a staff person at the CRE for a grand salary of $150 a month.

It had some similarities to Liberation Cafe. Some of the ideas there I think carried over. We would do programs every Friday night, either a movie or a speaker, sometimes maybe a music event. We had a lot of study groups and workshops, like how to get a divorce and how to get out of the military because San Diego was a military town. We had a newsletter every month. We had a library – a lending library – and many, many groups met there. We had a very nice physical space where we could hold up to about 75 people. I left San Diego to go to UMASS. I moved back East to start UMASS in ‘76. The idea of having a space where people could meet always stayed with me.

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I moved [to Olympia] in 1987. I got offered a job at Evergreen to teach in the Master's in Public Administration program, and I accepted the job. I was very happy to come out here, but I've mainly taught in the undergraduate level at Evergreen.

In the ‘80s – the period of Ronald Reagan as President – there were huge cutbacks in social programs and some significant protests around welfare cuts. Also, there were really major movements, both in solidarity with the struggles in Central America and against U.S. intervention, particularly U.S. intervention in El Salvador. So those movements continued to some extent in the ‘90s, and many of the people who were involved in Liberation Cafe came out of that.

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So it was a period not of huge social movements, not like the ‘60s and ‘70s, but a growth of movements. [There was a] strong women's liberation movement and a growing gay liberation movement. So the idea of Liberation Cafe was also connecting these movements. People could work together. It wouldn't just be one issue. It would be connecting different issues. So the idea of having a space where we could meet, have a library, and have education. Education to me is not just at the college, but it can take place every day in every place.

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Kelsey: The Liberation Cafe was an activist space that was established in the mid-nineties as a place for people to work, collaborate, host events, and engage with community. The cafe occupied the top floor of Bulldog News in downtown Olympia.

Peter: I believe very much in democratic organizations. It doesn't mean there isn't leadership. Different people have different skills, and I think it’s the idea of sharing those skills with other people too, but not in a group where somebody tells other people what to do. I think that's too much just reproducing the current society.

Originally, the idea of Liberation Cafe, which we never really succeeded at, there's a large number of people in Olympia, and nationally, who know from their life experiences from their friends, family, that something is really fundamentally wrong with the United States. People knowing something was wrong about working really hard, but not having enough money to live, still needing food stamps. So the idea was a space where people could really understand what are the causes of some of these problems.

So I was hoping to reach people I said, who were very critical of what's going on, but didn't maybe have a very deep analysis, wouldn't see themselves as kind of leftist. We never really attracted those people in large numbers. I remember once, a friend of mine, who was a union organizer, had a meeting there of the union, but said the space was too overtly leftist in terms of posters. So she said she didn't feel very good having union meetings there. So that was the weakness. We would never really accomplish what one of our main objectives was.

On the other hand, if you define people on the left broadly, not necessarily activists, but who think another system is both necessary and desirable, that racism, patriarchy, inequality is baked into the system we live in, and we need a different system and saw themselves trying to change it, we were successful in terms of our events. Probably on a Friday night, we averaged about 30 people a week, which is pretty good.

Kelsey: [Music begins playing in the background.] The Liberation Cafe was a prolific space for activists and artists. There were literally hundreds of events and workshops in that space in the few years it operated – everything from a mask-making workshop for the Procession of the Species to Cop Watch trainings, a regular spoken word night, and the Sex Workers Art Show. It also drew notable speakers, including Noam Chomsky and Black Panther Party co-founder, Bobby Seale, as well as beloved local artists like Nomy Lamm, Kathleen Hanna, Slim Moon, and Arrington De Dionyso. It served as an incubator for nonprofits that are still around today, including our local harm reduction network, EGYHOP [Emma Goldman Youth & Homeless Outreach Project].

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Peter: For many activist groups – and this is kind of an ongoing issue – have a pretty short lifespan. We had a problem staffing the place - keeping it open so people could study. We did have a lot of books and we had a lot of file cabinets on various issues, like developers in Olympia, some of the history of Olympia, some of the struggles here, but you needed to be open for that too. So much of the work ended up being trying to raise the money for the salary, not really doing outreach. So this issue of staffing a physical space for a small group was really an issue.

Kelsey: The need for affordable space is a theme that comes up repeatedly in our conversations with activists and creatives in our town, even as property costs continue to rise exponentially. The Liberation Cafe lost momentum and ended in 1999 when their hosting business Bulldog News closed down.

Peter: I do think the Olympia area, particularly when you think of Thurston County, which is now over 300,000 people. It’s really grown. There are enough people here for a political-cultural space to happen again. And not only focusing on how bad things are, which a lot of people do, but how can people change it. What are alternatives? What are some successful struggles and so on?

When we think that there were major economic, social, cultural problems in the 1990s, and they haven't gone away. The question of economic inequality has gotten worse. The growth of these really authoritarian, white nationalist movements, not just in the U.S. but globally have grown. And so where we can both learn about it and challenge these groups, and not just try to go back to the past. To me going back to the ‘90s – the Bill Clinton period – is hardly a solution. But where we try to continue to preserve democracy.

So a space where people can meet, strategize, work together across differences, socialize, combining social justice, economic justice with cultural [justice] seems to me a really important way to move forward.

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‍Meg Rosenberg: Community Roots is produced by Window Seat Media. This story was a collaboration between Peter Bohmer and Kelsey Smith. Kelsey is one of our Community Roots cohort members. She brought this story idea to us and interviewed Peter. Elaine Vradenburgh and Kristina Cannon did the audio editing for this story and Steven Suski produced the music for this series. Funding for this series was provided by the Thurston County Heritage Grant program, the Marie Lamfrom Foundation, ArtsFund, the Community Foundation of South Puget Sound, and from community support from people like you. To learn more about Window Seat Media, hear more stories, or make a donation to support this series, visit www.windowseatmedia.org.

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